Fast Fashion Systems

Chapter 1

Fast fashion systems – An introduction

Tsan-Ming Choi

Business Division, Institute of Textiles and Clothing,

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Fast fashion is an industrial trend that is pertinent in practice. It refers to the concept

of shortening lead time (production, distribution etc) and offering new products to

the market as fast as possible. Nowadays, this phenomenon is commonly adopted in

fashion

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apparel (by brands such as Zara, Topshop, H&M etc) and also “fashionable’’

consumer electronics (e.g. iphone). From an analytical modelling perspective, the key

components of fast fashion systems include (Cachon and Swinney 2011):

(i) Quick response policy which is employed to reduce the system response time

(i.e. lead time) so that volatile demand and supply can better match.

(ii) Product assortment which changes frequently.

(iii) Product lifecycle which is very short.

(iv) Product’s design which fits the fashion trend and market needs.

In order to establish efficient fast fashion systems, a few research areas have

emerged over the past few years and they include: (a) Optimizing fast fashion sys-

tems by conventional analytical approach (Fisher et al. 2001, Caro and Gallien 2010a,

2010b, Choi et al. 2011a), (b) use of information in fast fashion models (Choi 2007,

Szmerekovsky and Zhang 2008, Vaagen and Wallace 2008, Choi and Sethi 2010, Choi

2011, Yang et al. 2011, Chow et al. 2012), (c) Fast fashion multi-echelon supply chain

optimization models (Choi 2006, Choi and Chow 2008, Chen et al. 2010, Yeung et al.

2010, Chiu et al. 2011, Li et al. 2013), (d) fast fashion systems under competition

and game-theoretic analysis (Cachon and Swinney 2011), (e) intelligent forecasting

techniques in fast fashion systems (Choi et al. 2011b, Yu et al. 2011), (f) cases and dis-

cussions on fast fashion systems (Bhardwaj and Fairhurst 2010, Cagliano et al. 2011,

Tokatli et al. 2011), (g) statistical based empirical analysis of fast fashion strategies

(Choi et al. 2010).

Despite the abundance of both classical and new research results, there is an

absence of a comprehensive reference source that provides the state-of-the-art find-

ings on both theoretical and applied research on fast fashion systems. Thus, this

book project is organized. The completed book is organized into three parts as listed

below.

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The term fast fashion is more than just apparel and is applied to various other pertinent indus-

tries in the real world. See Yoganarasimhan (2012) and the references therein for a formal

academic definition of “fashion’’.